The Release

Lucy gave pause to the instructions; she took a long look at Grant and Salem’s tag-team duo. Right then, Salem shrieked as she pulled out a pair of bright pink thong underwear and held it between her pointer and thumb fingers and she tossed them at Grant, who sidestepped away from them as if they contained the virus. The chumminess bothered her, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. She couldn’t command them all to stay morose and depressed, it wasn’t healthy. It was fine to smile, find distraction, but still Lucy couldn’t escape how tactless the playfulness felt.

Stewing, Lucy walked over and pulled the first door open wide, letting it crash a little louder than she might have wanted. Then she went to the next, then the next, and then the next: Garbage, books, binders, chewed-down pencils, magnetic mirrors. Love notes from boyfriends, girlfriends, lunch bags, rotten fruit. The more lockers she searched, the more she realized how unsurprising the items were. When her classmates were reduced to things in a locker, they were impossible to differentiate from one another.

She stopped and leaned her head against one of the doors. It moved under the pressure and she could feel the metal digging into her forehead.

“Find anything? Salem called to her. Then without waiting for an answer, “Oh, gross…Grant…look at this one…”

Lucy raised her head from the door and sighed. She went to the next locker and rummaged through the usual assortment of items. Then she shoved a paper bag out of the way and realized that it didn’t budge. She picked it up, u

In the background, Grant and Salem expressed amusement and intrigue over someone’s large collection of American flags. They found a small pill bottle filled with Vicodin and high-fived at the find.

Lucy reached into the bag and took the gun in her right hand, and she let the bag fall to the floor where it fell to her feet. It was a revolver, like the cowboys in Westerns used to shoot. She examined it, rolling her hand over and she noticed the tremors in her fingers. She had never held a gun before, never felt the weight of it against her skin. Lucy recalled, with embarrassment, when her mother first dropped her off at Salem’s house for a play date, she took Mrs. Aguilar aside and asked brusquely if they had any guns in the house. “No. Of course not,” Mrs. Aguilar had answered in return, her face struggled against showing her offense. Only then did Maxine leave Lucy, kissing her for a second too long on the forehead and whispering instructions to call if she got homesick.

They did not own guns. Her father did not hunt.

And here she was, holding this gun and wondering—what did it mean? Why was it here?

Hidden in a lunch bag, with bullets.

Who did it belong to?

Lucy pondered the danger of it all, and she tried desperately to place a person at this locker mere feet from her own. Who opened it? Who sat under it in the morning? Had she ever been in danger?

But then the realization poured over her: Whoever brought this gun to school was likely dead now. Their intentions—to intimidate a bully, self-harm, bragging rights to friends—didn’t matter anymore. She pondered putting it back in the locker and shutting it back up, burying it under a geometry book and gym socks, hidden out of sight. Then Lucy realized that this could be a blessing. She spun and held the gun resting in the palm of her hand.

“Sal? Grant?” Lucy called, aware of the rise in the timbre of her voice. “I found something,” she said and turned to her friends.

“Is that a—” Grant started and he took a step. Sal turned around. She was holding a giant fleece blanket in one hand and a bulk container of hand-sanitizer in the other. She opened her mouth to speak, but then her head snapped quickly to the right.

They all heard the clank and rumble of the gates as they moved upward, unhooking from their magnetic bases. They were exposed. Lucy’s eyes darted to the camera and it was trained directly on them.

“The intercom is off,” Grant shouted and he scrambled forward to collect the items he had set aside. “We didn’t even notice…dammit…we didn’t even notice!”

Spencer had spotted them. He had been watching them and he knew they were there; knew they were hiding. But more disturbingly, he knew they had a gun.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Shit!” Grant yelled and he tugged Salem’s arm toward the East Wing hallway, pi

Lucy leaned down and grabbed the paper bag of bullets and darted forward, her bare feet slapping against the floor. But instead of turning up the narrow hallway, Lucy ran straight past them and down the English hall, toward the opening gates and toward Spencer.

“Are you crazy?” Grant called after her. “We gotta get out of here.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the camera and its subtle shift following her. She slowed at the turn and then peered around the corner.

“Wait,” she yelled to her friends, her voice was shrill and panicky. “Don’t go anywhere!”

Salem and Grant stood waiting at the edge of the hallway, ready to run, but Lucy kept peering around the corner. It was a long hallway to the main office and security office, roughly one hundred feet, but she had a perfect view. Unless Spencer was lying about being alone, there was no way he had time to man the cameras and also bolt after them.

“He’s still in the security office, just watching,” Lucy called to her friends.

“You sure?” Salem called.

Lucy nodded. “He put the gates up so we would run…so he could watch where we ran to.” Her heart pounded as she kept her eyes trained on the hallway, watching for Spencer’s lanky body to come barreling down upon them.

“I have an idea,” she called back to them. “Go to the lab, put the tables back and the ladder up. Then wait by the door for me. Don’t leave the lab until I come for you.”

Grant shook his head, just once, a quick and sudden shake and stepped back out into the hallway. “What? You’re bait?”

“I’m bait,” she replied and then drew in a tight breath.

Salem opened her mouth to protest, but Grant saluted her. “Good plan,” he said with admiration. The tone encouraged her, helped stay her shaking hands a bit. Lucy didn’t have a real plan other than to draw Spencer out of the security office so she could get them safely in their hideaway without detection. And if that didn’t work, she was fresh out of back-up plans.

Grant and Salem darted out of sight.

Lucy took a deep breath and with her back to the camera, she dropped the gun back into the paper bag. She crumpled up the top and then held it tightly in her hands. The gun was not an asset if Lucy didn’t know how to use it. She knew that Spencer was armed and she was not, but it was a risk she had to take.

She slid back out of view and pressed her back against the wall. The camera was on her. It moved, zoomed in, zoomed out. Spencer was no doubt watching Salem and Grant lead him to the journalism room, but there was Lucy, unmoving, a sitting duck. He had to wonder why.

For a second she wondered if Principal Spencer recognized her. If he knew her name or her year in school. She wasn’t an athlete or a drama kid. She never took a student council class and despite Salem’s pleading, she never wrote for the newspaper. Before all of the madness started, Lucy assumed that she would graduate from Pacific Lake with relative anonymity. She would be the person her classmates years later would sort-of remember as that “one girl in that one class”. People would try to pin down a list of defining characteristics, but they couldn’t.